


bellyache

by meatmarket



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 12:08:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16516193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: “Be still,” Johnny tells the back of Taeyong’s neck.





	bellyache

**Author's Note:**

> [life](https://66.media.tumblr.com/1d14262adc24a666e208cca956eea0f7/tumblr_pgg08lLye11vtg1ulo1_400.gif) [is](https://nakamotens.tumblr.com/post/173842456846/cuties-supporting-each-other) [great](http://nakamotens.tumblr.com/post/179073602166)  
> so anyone remember that smtown event in july this year—

Osaka looks like one chunky building with ingrown obligatory bushes.

In practice it’s nothing like the eyesore of Chicago poking arrows high into the sky left, right, center. Johnny always finds the gut swoop of greatness at having to look up, up, up overwhelming. But he respects it.

The van worms through the tight traffic, braking at an intersection so suddenly his guts have to catch up with the shove forward.

They’re crammed. Johnny’s only just coming down to the steady levels of post-stage blues, getting used to the slimy sweat and the violent splay of his legs. Someone had to donate in the name of conserved space.

He’s thigh to thigh with the door on one side and Taeyong’s bones pressing from the other; Taeyong expands in his chest when he yawns mid-talk with Mark, so Johnny sticks a finger in his open mouth to cut it off, drawing back fast before Taeyong makes a chew toy of it.

The pulsing high-rise wall of neon ads outside smothers in through the window, winking jewels onto Taeyong’s face.

Taeyong looks good. Taeyong looks devastating even with lips this close to shedding snakeskin. When Johnny’s sensibilities twitch to deed and he overturns his pockets, uncaps his weapon, and makes to chapstick the offense away, Taeyong dodges it like he’s in the Matrix with a, “What? What.”

“Your lips are sorry to be yours,” Johnny says. Nothing. “It’s gross.”

Taeyong’s huff smells like tired, warm breath, but he lets Johnny carry out his duty, one half-moon then two to make a mouth—

The van jerks and the chapstick butters into Taeyong’s teeth.

Now would be a great time to take a photo.

Backdropped by Taeyong’s spitting, Yuta points out the amphitheater, “Just sixteen streets away.”

This couldn’t be Chicago. Even at night when people and places look cloned from the same cell, Johnny is viscerally aware and glad for it.

 

* * *

 

He takes his midday snack to Taeyong and whoever’s and forgets it the moment he sprawls on the mattress like a geriatric snow angel. Discussing one of the miscellaneous bad things concurrently fronting the world (and both home) news at any given moment does that.

“Shit makes me wanna get high sometimes.”

He expects—as he’s come to, to survive better—the snarled lip of preordained disgust or a knobby warning finger up his nostril, but Taeyong just. Hums.

When Johnny’s staring stretches into a physical entity, Taeyong looks up from arranging his underwear as if he, too, expected something. “And? D’you miss it?”

Suddenly, irrationally, he feels like the walls are paper and they have an audience even though his laptop’s camera is pirate-eyepatched and still wedged in his suitcase back in his room and his phone’s getting a recharge on the nightstand next to Taeyong’s fussing hip.

Taeyong has this thing where he’s able to throw Johnny for a loop with the basest of things. Most people can’t even pick him up.

“I can’t remember what it was like. Just that airing myself on the balcony of my then-bestie, that did nothing for the stink afterwards. Let me tell you.”

“Were you one of the cool boys?”

“I was very cool.”

“Yes, you rocked that ten-meter fringe coolly.”

“What’s that?” That’s foul play, is what that is. Johnny anchors an elbow, putting his weight on it, only half as embarrassed as he should be. “You used to talk slower with your braces in.”

Taeyong’s head does that quick _damn you_ tilt.

“But you’ve never been,” Johnny circles back. Never been high, obviously.

“Obviously,” Taeyong says.

As far as Johnny knows.

He looks around for evidence, trying to piece together the roommate roster where his memory’s calling it a day. All that rears its head is the stylist-noona’s teeth, how they’re gonna chew Johnny up at the incoming pimpleland condition of his dying skin as the protagonist of her worst nightmare to work with, two-in-one with a lecture on taking stage makeup. Off. Immediately.

“Who’re you with? Taeil?”

Taeyong makes a noncommittal sound. “Doyoung had a spider in his bed.”

“He did?”

“He thought he did. It was so funny—”

The giggle hiccups dry when he notices Johnny’s roentgen inspection.

“—and scary. For him. He was ready to bail, and so he did, may he rest in peace. I went in to check. There was no spider.”

“His hero,” says Johnny. “Does he know he now owes you his life?”

 

  

As far as Johnny is unconcerned, the other currently empty bed that’s not Taeyong’s is free real estate. They collaborate in a temporary Bob the Builder unit, in which Johnny is the builder and Taeyong the Bob who oversees the bed-joining and how seamlessly they create one perch.

They lie down side to side in their respective nests, and Taeyong makes an animal sound when he stretches long and limp like taffy, his chin and jaw softened at the angle. Johnny feels his joints liquefying the longer the movie flickers on, the longer he’s pleasantly rotting and stagnant against the cotton cloud of a pillow.

A bag of salted peanuts sits forgotten on the TV stand. They destroy it and risk choking from not having their heads propped high enough. As the mid-credits scene rolls, Taeyong fiddles with the subtitles and watches English-only, not once asking Johnny to translate little words.

He steals Johnny’s hand by the wrist like it’s nothing. Murmurs, “Your pinky doesn’t fit the box.”

Puzzled, Johnny ticks between his hand and Taeyong’s face to figure out the similarity, and if he’s on the right track. Clunky, heavy. Homogeneous.

“When you wave,” with his own pinky, Taeyong levers Johnny’s away from his ring finger, “it sticks out.”

There are powdered salt grains stuck under Taeyong’s nails.

“Got a mind of its own.” Johnny knots their pinkies like they’re promising.

The cheese of it ruins Taeyong’s clean face. He cringes hard, his mouth splaying down and spotlighting his shiny teeth like he’s just stepped into a puddle with the socks on, and Johnny will never see anything better. Ever.

Laughing like an engine short of breath himself, Johnny oofs. He’s hit. He’s been hit, for Christ’s sake, visual blow or not, square in the chest and has no kind ear for his exaggeration for miles. But he doesn’t let Taeyong break the link just yet, so Taeyong’s left whining nonsense of being oppressed.

The moment the ache of keeping his arm hovering tweezes at his bicep, Johnny starts to re-think. Freeing both their hands is an awkward relief.

“No,” Taeyong warns.

Watching Taeyong seize head-to-toe in guard of his ticklish spots, Johnny says, “I won’t.”

The uncoil from disillusioned, anger-rusted bed spring to a soft-bellied hedgehog is a fluent unfurling and one of Taeyong’s most endearing. Johnny’s smug to be taken at his word stat, especially, somehow, when it comes to nothings.

Shit. Taeyong’s eyes.

Through a monitoring not long ago, Johnny learned it took lots of direct production lighting to dilute their blackness at all. That’s a weird thought, he’d say. Blink. Taeyong’s straight lashes are hooding down over his eyes like the sides of a slanted house roof, so much they probably whisper-smudge the top of whatever he’s looking at.

Here’s a weird thought. Right now, he’s looking at Johnny.

Johnny needs water.

And clearly, his focus needs to stop playing hopscotch with where not to pause, because Taeyong’s cheeks apple and he explodes into a splutter-laugh, eyebrows perking up in two surprised caterpillars. Johnny is annoyingly disarmed even before Taeyong’s icicle hand smacks over his face.

To which Johnny issues, “Appreciate it.”

 

 

He’s toe-curlingly warm. Something winged is keening like high violin at his temple and winding in a to-fro orbit. Somewhere along his shin—no. Left ankle. Along his left ankle. Somewhere there, it itches horribly, but that’s worlds away.

Johnny is… warm. Johnny is, hey.

“Johnny. Hey.”

His eyes unstick to a blot. That blot bulges to form and gets a face.

There’s a quilt tucked all the way under Johnny’s chin.

“I’m taking care of my business. You gonna be okay out here?”

“The evil,” Johnny yawns, and the seams of his mouth thin to snappable membrane, “of this abode is leaving. Aren’t y’hearing yourself.”

Taeyong crooks a smile. “I can make a quick trip for your furry friends if His Majesty is feeling lonely.”

Before Johnny’s brain cogs wheel up to speed, Taeyong’s already gone.

 

 

Steamed and pinked like raw tuna up to his nipples, Taeyong rolls onto the scene in a wispy cloud of haze, and all he’s missing are stage lights. And clothes other than the high-waisted turban he’s sushi’d his towel into.

Nipple level means the tub must be pretty roomy so the water can reach up. Big enough that if Johnny really wanted to, for whatever creative reasons, maybe he could’ve jam-packed behind Taeyong and rocked out only a Chenle-sized splash of the soapy shampoo marinade for Taeyong to bitch about as he ice-skated off the tiles after.

Johnny snorts.

“Hm? What?”

“Did you use up all the toiletry samples?” he chances.

Taeyong’s shrug spindles the bones of his shoulders like knitting needles catching on yarn. “That’s why they’re there. For me to sample them.”

“Sample them to death.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“I heard.”

“What’s with you?” Taeyong acknowledging whatever he’s acknowledging suggests plural, a layered backstory to his restlessness. Potentially. Johnny would hate to project. “Have you seen my console? Ah, this is…”

He knees onto the bed, the wet towel unpeeling a slit up his thigh when he leans for his phone.

“Oh,” Taeyong stalls once settled, the tip of his nose frosty from the screen. He scratches at the furrow of his collarbone, not looking up to Johnny halfway through the door. “Noona says hi.”

 

* * *

 

Jaemin helps dig up Mark from their shared room. So Johnny, in turn to his own pleasure, dangles the carrot of rare family time (with the full headcount) over Taeyong’s attention and puppeteers him out of a good time of self-isolation on third try.

They get the lobby’s lobby, a backroom in the hotel’s respectable gutter that isn’t half-bad. Off-white walls, sinking fluffy black carpet, if a bit plasticky to breathe from not having had enough guests to break it in yet.

Per Taeyong’s request, Doyoung haggles with the manager for more edibles and drinkables and makes it look like the manager’s the one being done a favor when he leaves them to it.

An hour later, Mark’s eyes are black glitter. Under the low lamp, his eyelashes look like moth wings, and he sounds slowed down to jello speed when he says, “If you think too much about it, it’ll lose its meaning.”

“Nietzsche,” Donghyuck finishes.

“Bless you,” says Ten, blasé and bending over the jenga blocks firmly like a pipe.

To Johnny, he shoots, “Stop laughing and focus,” the corner of his eye ticking. “Whose team you on?”

“Whoever wins’.”

“Then help me out, old man.”

“Don’t get excited,” Johnny ties the entirety of their English conversation with a tight bow and spots Ten as the best wingman of the night. “Go.”

“Don’t drop it, don’t drop it—” Jisung leans closer.

And Ten doesn’t. Impossible, with such impeccable teamwork. He volleys Johnny a very loose smile. They don’t need to look as they high-five.

Because, no matter how half-gone, Mark exhibits few signs of discovered life besides cricket noises at Donghyuck’s custom nagging, Hyuck audibly sours about all that “rotten work.”

What do kids read these days?

It’s late, and Johnny knows Mark is drunk on top of drunk courtesy of the hour. Johnny narrowly misses Donghyuck’s twisting-away neck that he wants to pet. Everyone knows to give it a moment.

One of Mark’s eyes is blinking like it’s encountered an alien object, not looking anywhere that isn’t his sloshed-over grape soju.

With his chin punched up at an angle, Donghyuck removes himself from the situation and circles like a try-on around the cross-legged cluster of them.

Fusing into Sicheng’s hip is no more of a success, and Donghyuck stews in that ugly cherry-on-top-of-all-his-rejected-wiles realization until he (seemingly) makes peace by finding his refuge of affection under the goodwill of Jeno’s armpit.

“Okaaay,” Taeyong says.

And so it goes. Not long after, Doyoung, the dreamiesitter for hire, takes it upon himself to evict all who weren’t allowed to sip to their respective rooms. He does it even against—or maybe because of—Taeyong’s half-hearted pawing to do it himself.

Johnny suppresses a fond smile.

Nobody protests, and they all pile onto their boneless legs, slurring their goodnights.

Kun mans up and unbolts the single door-passing window this room has to air out the probably-mustard stink.

By his second bottle, Taeil dares Jaehyun to hold Johnny’s hand throughout the next two rounds, something Jaehyun has no problem with outside of reaction time and the motor skill to uproot himself from Jungwoo’s deathtrap clutch.

Taking mercy, Johnny shuffles over to the worryingly medical whipcrack tune of his back and feels for Jaehyun’s fingers.

Round two, they’re sticky when they let go.

Round four, Taeyong startles his way into Johnny’s periphery just as a duck-lipped Jaehyun, cued by Yuta’s sniper’s concentration, expertly pinches a jenga block from the middle and deposits in on top with overdramatic gusto. Yuta smiles, dazzling in his home glow. Even sober, he seems deeply affected.

Taeyong’s shoulders are flinched in on themselves as he wiggles in front of Johnny, makes a sofa out of Johnny, forces Johnny’s legs apart to sit between them.

Scooting back via the GPS of clamping Johnny’s thighs, Taeyong’s arms have goosebumped raw from the night nipping beneath his t-shirt, but he thrones himself effortlessly.

And then Johnny’s smelling fresh laundry. The forever-old batch that’s wispy with wear and homesick and so cozy to power-nap in. A twig digging into softwood for warmth, Taeyong shimmies. Asks for Johnny’s hands and melts out of his skin upon their touchdown.

“Be still,” Johnny tells the back of his neck, tamping down the bubble wrap in his belly.

Ten’s hand ricochets up in the air when Jaehyun asks from next to the soju table who in the class wants an encore.

Jaehyun nods, “Beg.”

“Pay me,” Ten says.

“You’re praying to the wrong god.”

Taeyong’s forearms are just wire. Rubbing feeling back into them, Johnny feels the veins pop and cross with blood, and folds closer.

You could iron clothes down the snowballed stiffness of Taeyong’s back, easy. His oddly broad shoulders have locked into a perfect scholarly flagpole, keeping his shoulder blades sheathed.

Johnny kneads the fight-or-flight out of him, catching on the way the back of his ribs bloats and shies with his breath. The first knob of Taeyong’s spine pronounces harsher as he hangs his head. With it, the sharp outcrop corners of his jaw dip from view.

Johnny smuggles his longing, usually. He’s good at waiting it out, or jacking it out, or taking it out, or. But this is just hilariously bad.

The way the jenga blocks’ base is looking, gravity is being defied tonight. Xuxi green-lights Kun’s ambitious move, except his depth perception is shot to shit and—

“Aaah!” Xuxi claps once in defeat. “Good game, though.”

Kun shakes pieces of said game out of his elephant-eared sleeve.

Jaehyun and Mark spontaneously break into a noraebang of celebration, roping Ten in. They harmonize horribly, and Doyoung takes it upon himself to save the day because whatever was in the water the year they were hired, “The company must’ve taken in just about anybody with two eyes who didn’t have male pattern baldness in the family.”

Johnny’s laugh punches out of him. Taeyong starts, for the jumpscare second unable to figure out where the sudden tectonic shifts come from. From behind, Johnny jams to the a cappella and pilots Taeyong’s arms outward like discount airplane wings.

“Ay, ay, ay,” Mark’s head nods in time, “ay, ay, ay.”

“Wrong song,” Ten grins.

The leftovers join flatly, some of them catatonic and sounding like a funeral choir, until they get a mild shut the fuck up from the peeking-in manager.

They’re ordered to retire their royal tea party and turn back time on the state of the lobby. Which is to say—well, it says something, something loud, because when Jungwoo blinks the soju-happy fugue away, he seems this close to stroking out at realizing the extent of their collective pigging.

Taeyong clips the cacophonic groans of pain (laziness) short with volunteer work to take care of it, assuring he will, and they can all go merrily ahead because Johnny will help him, that’s right. Jungwoo countervolunteers only to be shooed away.

Not by Johnny, though. That’s Johnny’s last hope being herded out the door.

He stays put for someone to gallop back in and free him from this.

All at once, Taeyong bears all his twenty kilos into Johnny as if needing a five from all the toil it takes to give up sitting straight. He’s not much, a pack of lean muscle that could easily go missing from the display at the butcher’s, but with no support from Johnny’s six o’clock, it’s also the kind of core work that’s insulting to his posture.

“I’m afraid my contract doesn’t cover this.” Johnny looks around by way of pointing a finger at the crime scene, then at himself as collateral damage. “Ask first next time.”

Taeyong can make silence seem thoughtful. Like a gift horse, not meant to be inspected. He’s not much, but he’s too much.

Pillowed by Johnny’s shoulder, Taeyong mouths what could be a really wet word into his jaw, and all sorts of rash-red alarms trigger in his body.

“You drunk?” Johnny asks.

And good fucking Lord, alright. He compartmentalized the last time quite neatly in its own pickle jar deep in the whatever-that-was cellar he doesn’t visit. His heartbeat’s not doing so good.

Taeyong doesn’t bother to reel his head completely, the one area he’s frugal in. He regards Johnny askance, catlike and half-lidded in judgment, but the act gets the same kind of watery as shaken laminated paper sounds for a moment, just a bit hesitant before it snaps back.

The pockmark next to his right eye looks like a disfigured diamond imprint.

Johnny wonders, but Taeyong just mouths at him again.

“Taeyong. Are you dru—”

“No,” Taeyong drawls. Silly. “Are you?”

“I’m not.”

“Well.”

In a risky maneuver, he hooks himself higher by Johnny’s shoulder for better alignment, his thick neck wringing with the angle.

Their mouths tack together. Taeyong’s is licked clean but Johnny remembers slathering on Vaseline. He grooms Taeyong’s hair back, and it’s benevolent for all of no time before it tickles back into place. So fond, Johnny ducks down smack-dab into another peck and smooths his mouth side to side to feel out Taeyong’s lip shape, how his cupid’s bow swells.

“Wanna sit up properly?” Johnny asks into it.

Yeah, Taeyong breathes, yeah, Taeyong does, untwisting himself from his contortionist pose, and almost leapfrogs in his rush to straddle Johnny cleanly as if choreographed. He sleighs as far up on Johnny’s thighs as they go, pressing them hips to hips and making armrests of his legs for Johnny’s elbows.

He only watches Taeyong’s mouth. The bad lighting gives it shadow, plumping its swoopy design and deepening his philtrum.

Something pinches his skin tighter when Taeyong kisses him and sighs as when a soda can opens, hitch then exhale.

How Taeyong is the relieved one is funny. So funny, in fact, that Johnny won’t say a word of it.

Johnny sees nothing. Taeyong’s thighs flex around him, Taeyong’s mouth waits for him, and he uses both as the midpoint to find the tailbone, scooping Taeyong closer with his forearms.

Johnny doesn’t care for getting acquainted, or how he’s afraid of it, just a bit, just maybe. He cheats his way right to kittenish licks and the pillowy give of soft lip, and Taeyong arches into it. The back of Johnny’s neck heavies with hands. Their noses rub and they mutually crumple, making him feel Taeyong’s breath, and it travels down his belly, pulsing blisters in his fingers.

Taeyong’s hand clenches into his bicep. “You should eat more.”

Johnny peeks at Taeyong’s cheeks. They’re glossy and symmetrical and endless up close, and they slim down when Johnny bites over his lip and pulls until his jaw slacks down. His throat makes pleased gravel that hooks a fizz through Johnny’s teeth, tickling his palate.

Taeyong is greedy.

Taeyong tastes good. Tastes even better as they pop apart with the sloppy slide of tongue because Johnny’s already forgetting, like hearing your own voice, and knows he’ll have to revisit.

His spine prickles. Along his hairline, in his palms and above his numbed lip, he’s working up a sweat from the headache of recycled air and…

When he dives for a breath, Taeyong’s neck smells like deodorant smells like the heady kiss Johnny plants there. Squirming like a worm out of mud, Taeyong takes him by the jaw to have him quit it, thumbnail biting the tender skin under Johnny’s jaw.

“You do the bottles, I do the plates?” Johnny asks. His chin is slick. It feels like he’s seeing new colors.

“What?”

“How long do we have until he’s back on our asses?”

Taeyong’s body stutters like the key in his wind-up toy back got a late start. He pulls to his feet, swaying, almost plunging his dick in Johnny’s face before he centers.

Taeyong’s shirt is an old wrinkled face, its jowl saggy over his shoulder where Johnny tugged at the collar to get to the bone. Taeyong looks sorely out of his element.

“Is there a”—he eyes the razor-silver ashtrays along the windowpane—“trash can here? I’m gonna get one.”

Johnny nods.

 

* * *

 

Taeyong and airplanes have an ongoing feud. It’s pretty one-sided—he doesn’t agree with the thing airplanes are known most for doing, and the airplanes, to balance it out, don’t give a shit.

They check Johnny’s passport. They make sure he’s not a batch of trafficking or an unusually-looking terrorist—or in the US they do. He’s sorry to be leaving Japan, the country that acts as its own humidifier.

Johnny watches the fidgety hand. The lock-unlocking knee, the dying need Taeyong gets to be distracted that turns him into a social butterfly on Red Bull.

Taeyong doesn’t like flying. Johnny’d go as far as to say he hates it. Doesn’t matter that he’s spent a sixth of his life on board, his squeezed insides are good as new the moment they’re passing the security, a little hair-raising current. He once said it felt like tiny needles all over.

Johnny smiles at the conveyor belt lady. She doesn’t twitch a muscle.

 

 

“Where’s Renjun?” Johnny asks.

“Swapped.”

“Because?”

“His seat’s about to be taken.” Taeyong’s got a hard candy in his mouth that he’s clacking around his teeth like a puck, that caramel thing slid inside the napkin packets the stewardess made the rounds allotting. The sound of it jams ice-picks into Johnny’s frontal lobe.

One hour to landing, Taeyong wolfs through the in-flight seaweed snack, clicking his tongue in connoisseurship and humming as he undresses its staticky foil. His eyes get so round when he eats, just tennis balls. All he’s missing is a zoom-in sound effect when he targets Johnny’s snack, nodding his biblical nose to it, asking if he’s eating that.

Johnny says that yeah, he sure is, and makes no move to lower his e-book.

Johnny flips the page.

He must be so obvious in his wanting, tripping over himself inside for attention like a dog. Then again, Taeyong never gives anything he doesn’t want to. Johnny smiles to himself, unkind. The window on his periphery is a pastel-blue egg of an always-sunny, always-cloudless day this high up, slicing light like a bad lens flare.

Half-assedly pinging, the seat belt signs above their heads heat up red, and they’re asked to please not vacate their seats, as they’re nearing a turbulence. It’s a brief one, barely an exhale, but Taeyong white-knuckles through it.

Johnny sneezes into his elbow, turning sideways like a Twizzler. He waits for another one because these ticklish-in-the-nose ones travel in packs, but nothing. Relaxing back, he unboxes his AirPods and gets to business.

He scrolls his playlist until he can’t, because Taeyong is reaching over and tugging at his thumb.       

Johnny looks up. What?

Taeyong takes Johnny’s hand and slabs it on the armrest between them, watching with interest. He nudges it on its back and crawls his awfully bony fingers between Johnny’s. He squeezes them shut together, and Johnny hurts the whole way home.

**Author's Note:**

> [[soulful sax solo]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPy5igZJnVw)


End file.
